LT 450 - Berlin Perspectives in German Literature

Berlin, with its turbulent history and striking contrasts, has inspired a broad range of poets, writers, and authors in Germany. From Alfred Döblin who depicted Berlin as a modernist and futuristic city in 1929, Christa Wolf imagining a city of romance during the Cold War, Emine Sevgi Özdamar showing us Berlin in the 1960s as both, a city of working class migrants and of intellectuals, to Helene Hegemann who sketches Berlin as a psychedelic landscape of techno sounds in the new millennium: This course will focus on authors who chose Berlin as a setting for their literary worlds, character developments, and dramatizations. We will ask how Berlin is constructed in their texts and what writing techniques are used to build an image of the city in literary spaces and genres. Furthermore, we will focus on the question of how Berlin's 'real' literary scenes at a certain time had an influence on the literary reconstructions of Berlin as a setting. Students interested in German Literature, Berlin Studies and Theories of Spatial Writing are very welcome to this class.

NOTE: This course is offered during the regular semester and in the summer. For summer sections, the course schedule is condensed, but the content, learning outcomes, and contact hours are the same.